Original Title

CGiii Comment

A work of absolute, unbridled perversion.

This is period porn...done with the intentions to [both] provoke and shock. What it actually achieves is far from the intended...abject monotony, even with a gigantic, prosthetic penis! And, no doubt, demands from those who paid to witness this torture.

If you want to watch period porn...watch Tinto Brass' atrocious Caligula - at least it has a smidgen of entertainment value. Liberty has none. There is no story to speak of...it's 132 excruciating minutes of crotch rubbing, in the dark, in a wood and punctuated with eye-watering sexual fetishes.

If Albert Serra's desire was to show humanity at its most debauched and depraved, he succeeded. Despite all of his intellectualising...this is indecent film-making on so many levels. Notable film festivals have screened it...even winning: Un Certain Regard - Special Jury Prize @ Cannes. A laughable win to say the least...but, the actual outrage is...the film-maker [and the film festivals] expecting people to hand over their hard-earned cash to watch this hyped tripe.

The(ir) Blurb...

1774, a few years before the French Revolution, somewhere between Potsdam and Berlin... Madame de Dumeval, the Duke of Tesis and the Duke of Wand, libertines expelled from the Puritan court of Louis XVI, sought the support of the legendary Duke of Walchen, a seducer and free thinker from Germany, alone in a country where hypocrisy and false virtue reigned. Their mission: to export libertinage to Germany, a philosophy of enlightenment based on the rejection of morality and authority but also, and above all, to find a safe place to continue their misguided games.